The first BETA of Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna Fluxbox Community Edition was released. Maintained in Romania by Shane Joe Lazar, this edition replaces Gnome with Fluxbox to provide a much more lightweight operating system.

I have been looking over the Fluxbox Edition by using the Live CD at the moment and let me be the first to say,WOW! This is by far the most complete and balanced fluxbox based distribution I have ever seen! Here are some of the things I thought were very noteable.

1) The theme has the mint look and is consistent in all applications.

2) The logon and logoff sounds have a nice fresh sound to them.

3) Conky has a Mint look to it! (Nice touch!)

4) Tools are included for user's on dial up connections. (Nice to see a distribution that considers these user's.)

5) Very good balance of light applications for speed and applications that are very functional such as Firefox and Thunderbird.

There are so many good things it is hard to list them all! There is a very impressive list of applications This certainly has all of the potential to start a new standard in Fluxbox based distributions!

So far running from the Live CD I have only found very minor imperfections.

1) The residual config files need to be removed before the final release. ( Yes, I am a stickler for this and look for this in any distribution.)

2) Shoutcast will not play with MPlayer or Exail. All other media types I tried worked perfectly. (Nice Exail Theme!)

3) Some icons need removed from within the various sections of "Auto-Generated Menu. This is very minor but it would keep the consistency of the rest of the menu.

4) Under Window Managers in the menu, Metacity is listed if a user selects it they need to Ctrl, Alt, Backspace and log back on to use the system again. I would remove the Metacity from this menu to avoid this. Just a suggestion. Edit: Metacity does not appear when installed to HDD.

I have not tested all of the Mint tools as the release notes mention them but I will check them out when I install the beta on my test HDD. I would also like to ask if a wallpaper entry could be put in the menu to change wallpapers. Edit: I found "Wallpaper Chooser" in the system menu!

This is a very impressive beta! Anyone that enjoys Fluxbox has got to experience this for themselves! Words simply can not express how good this beta is, it is some of the finest and well thought out work I have ever seen! My thanks go out to all that have worked to make this happen. Brilliant work!

Last edited by exploder on Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Wonderful with fast download servers - downloaded both the Fluxbox beta and Debian alfa in a matter of minutesI have so far run it in Virtualbox - of course not the best way to get the feel of speed, but I've got a reasonably fast computer (Athlon 64 3700+ and 2 GB memory)Just before the desktop appeared there was some odd artifact - the words Fluxbox and Mint in some grey foreground./Edit/ It's the splash in some distorted way //Edit again/Has to do with Virtualbox I got the same with Daryna standard gnome live CD i VirtualboxAnd I don't find the menu.... This can be ignorance on my side about fluxbox, but anyway/Edit/ Indeed it was - right click the desktop Very nice start up music!Have to do some more testing....

Congratulations to Shane for the beta release! I know how hard he has worked on this.

I'd just like to say a word about the size of the iso, which might seem a bit too big at 513 megs!Fluxbox is traditionally associated to low end systems, but Mint Fluxbox Edition tries to change that mindset. It is not really meant for systems with low resources, but rather it aims to make the best of a system with 'normal' configuration through the use of Fluxbox as its WM/DE. That justifies the inclusion of 'heavy' programs like Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc, which you don't often see with a Fluxbox distro!

@ EdwardsNHIPv6 is blacklisted by default in all Mint - as long as no one is using it and as it can be a big problem we might as wellI would guess you get the same with Ubuntu - it's that for some reason the "video section" of Mint does not like your laptop - ATI by any chance? (but nvidia gives trouble too in some cases)

First of all thanks to all of you who have downloaded, tested and given you feedback on this beta... I am following this thread as often as I can... However, I am not at home right now... I am on holiday visiting my parents, and will be here for a few more weeks at least... The internet connection here is very slow and expensive... so please bear with me if my feedback is not prompt and doesnt cater for everyone... for now can you offer solutions to each other's problems... there's a good chance it will be better than what i have to offer... and i will incorporate the fixes in the next release...